American happiness and discontents : the unruly torrent, 2008-2020 / George F. Will.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Will, George F., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Manners and customs.

Political culture.

Civilization.

United States--Civilization--21st century.

United States.

Political culture--United States--21st century.

United States--Social life and customs--21st century--Anecdotes.

United States--History--Anecdotes.

History.

Genre:

Anecdotes.

History.

Essays.

Physical Description:

xxi, 505 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York, NY : Hachette Books, Hachette Books Group, 2021.

Summary:

"From the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will, his ninth collection of reflections on our culture, examining the many ways in which expertise, reason, and manners are continually under attack in our institutions, courts, political arenas, and social venues. George F. Will has been one of this country's leading columnists since 1974. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it in 1977. The Wall Street Journal once called him "perhaps the most powerful journalist in America." In this new collection, he examines a remarkably unsettling thirteen years in our nation's experience, from 2008 to 2020. Included are a number of columns about court cases, mostly from the Supreme Court, that illuminate why the composition of the federal judiciary has become such a contentious subject. Other topics addressed include the American Revolutionary War, historical figures from Frederick Douglass to JFK, as well as a scathing assessment of how State of the Union Addresses are delivered in the modern day. Mr. Will also offers his perspective on American socialists, anti-capitalist conservatives, drug policy, the criminal justice system, climatology, the Coronavirus, the First Amendment, parenting, meritocracy and education, China, fascism, authoritarianism, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, and the morality of enjoying football. American Happiness and Discontents: The Unruly Torrent, 2008-2020 is a collection packed with wisdom and leavened by humor from one the preeminent columnists and intellectuals of our time"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Machine generated contents note: From Runnymede to Stelle's Hotel

A Nation Not Made by Flimsy People

News Bulletin: The American Revolutionary War Was Violent

U.S. Grant, and the Writing of History, Rescued

Frederick Douglass, A Classical Liberal Born at Sixteen

An Illinois Pogrom

Let Us Now Praise President Taft

America's Dark Home Front during World War I

The Somme: The Hinge of World War I, and Hence of Modern History

Prohibition's Unintended Consequences

When America Reached Peak Stupidity

"Tell That to Mrs. Coolidge"

1940: When the Republican Establishment Mattered

America's Last Mass Lynching

A Year in U.S. History as Disruptive as 2020

The Perverse Fecundity of a Perfect Failure

The Transformation of a Murder, and of Liberalism

JFK: Not So Elusive

Vietnam: Squandered Valor

Not an Illness, a Vaccine

Haunted by Hue

Apollo 11: A Cap Tossed over the Wall

The Thunderclap of Ocean Venture '81

"This Is Going to Be Difficult"

Home to Henry Wright's Farm

Looking Backward through Rose-Tinted Glasses

Crises and the Collectivist Temptation

The Announcement of a Presidential Candidacy You Will Never Hear

The Awful State of the State of the Union Address

How Not to Select Presidential Candidates

Socialism: A Classification That No Longer Classifies

American Socialists: Half Right

Anti-Capitalist Conservatives versus Progressives: The Narcissism of Small Differences

Better Never Means Better for Everyone

The Extravagant Faith of Market Skeptics

Nikki Haley against "Hyphenated Capitalism"

Data Confounds the Cassandra Caucus

Worse Can Be Better

Lear Raging on His Twitter-Heath

"Baumol's Disease" Is the Public Sector's Health

Defining Efficiency Down

America, Dated by "Rule Stupor"

Larry Summers's Epiphany

The National Endowment for the Arts' Adaptive Evolution

Ignorance of the Law Is...Inevitable

The Catholic Crime Wave

Bootleggers and Baptists, Together Yet Again

Overcriminalization Killed Eric Garner

Drug Policy and the "Balloon Effect"

Rethinking the Drug Control Triad

Injustices in the Criminal Justice System

Coercive Plea Bargaining Is a National Embarrassment

How the Right to a Trial Is Nullified

Disenfranchising Felons: Why?

Human Reclamation through Bricklaying

Sing Sing: "Not a Landfill but a Recycling Center"

Aristotle and the Bikini-Clad Baristas

The Recurring Evil of the "One Drop" Rule

"Judicial Engagement" against the Administrative State

Legal Logic versus Judicial Labels

Public Sector Unions: FDR Was Right

The Court's Correct Correction

Social Sciences, Brain Science, and the Eighth Amendment

"Depravity" and the Eighth Amendment

When Vernon Madison Was Not "Competent to Be Executed"

Will It Be 1972 Forever? The High Court's Misplaced Modesty

Philadelphia's "Room 101"

"What Country Are We In?"

Do Fish Perform Pedicures?

"Shut Up!": North Carolina Explained

A Cake and "Animus" in Colorado

A Victory (Only) for the Baker

Supreme Court to the Prickly Plaintiffs of Greece, New York: Lighten Up

Cranky Secularists Have Their Cross to Bear

Resuscitating the Rights of National Citizenship

Korematsu v. United States, Repudiated

The Court and the Politics of Politics

Litigating through a Fog of Euphemisms

Mapping the Universe Between Our Ears

Medicalizing Character Flaws

A Telescope as History Teacher

"Take a Sun and Put It in a Box"

The Pathology of Climatology

The MWP, LIA, and the Climate Change Debate

A Note on Violins and Climate Change

You Are Not a Teetering Contraption

The Coronavirus's Disturbing Lesson

A Pessimist's Fatal Conceit

"Creative Destruction": More the Former than the Latter

The Accelerated Churning

The Great Enrichment, the Great Flinch, and the Complacent Class

Pope Francis's Fact-Free Sanctimony

Peak Nonsense about Scarcities

The Not at All Dismal Science

"Where Is the Pencil Czar?"

The Ideological Ax-Grinding of the 1619 Project

"Is Food the New Sex?"

About That Snake in the Center Seat

Sanitizing Names Is Steady Work

Ban "Oklahoma"?

A Raised Eyebrow about "Redskins"

Slants, Redskins, and Other Insensitivities

What Is the Matter with Oregon?

Progressivism at Oregon's Gas Pumps

Oregon Engineers Another Embarrassment

The 1960s Echo: The Politics of Reciprocal Resentment

The "Hometown-Gym-on-a-Friday-Night" Feeling

An Endangered Species: The American Adult

The Plight of Princeton Women

Anti-Elitism and the "Meteorologist Fallacy"

The Problem with "Parental Determinism"

Free-Range Parenting

The Damage Done by Too Much Parental Praise

"Advantage Hoarding" in Cognitively Stratified America

Awesome Children and Difficult Food Choices

in Gentrified Brooklyn

36,000 Valedictorians: "They Can't All Go to Brown."

The First Amendment Amended: Freedom from Speech

The First Amendment in the "Free Speech Gazebo"

The "Surveillance State" in Ann Arbor

Salutary Ludicrousness

The Campus "Rape Culture" and the Death of Due Process

All Right Then, What an Unreasonable Person Finds Offensive

The College Degree as Status Marker

Yale and Other Incubators

Another Yale Burlesque, "Contextualized"

Diversity: In Everything but Thought

Mandatory Political Participation in California

"Sustainability" as Theology

The Consequences of Academia's Kudzu-like Bureaucracies

The High Cost of Oberlin's "Core Values"

Academic Supply Meets Diminishing Demand

Taxing Independent Excellence

Harvard's Problem Is America's, Too

About Harvard: Three Hard Questions

The SAT and the Privilege, If Such It Is, of Transmitted Advantages

Meritocracy and the SAT's "Adversity Index"

The Surplus of Intellectual Emptiness

A Hymn to Impracticability

Brittany Maynard: Death on Her Terms

Abortion: Who Are the Extremists?

The Wholesome Provocations of "Heartbeat Bills"

"America's Biggest Serial Killer"

"Inappropriate"

Iceland's Final Solution to the Down Syndrome "Problem"

Jon Will at Forty

German Resistance: Neither Negligible nor Contemptible

Eichmann: Not "Terrifyingly Normal"

The 442nd

"Into Eternity, Vilma"

"It Happened. Therefore It Can Happen Again."

The Politics of Memory

"Falling Soldier": A Well-Intended Falsification

China: Churchill's Foreboding, Redux

Faint Echoes of Fascism

Authoritarianism and the Politics of Emotion

The Plague of Denim

Drowning in a River of Public Words

Hobbes at Whole Foods

A Car under a Cloud of Smug

Frank Sinatra's Reminder

Appropriation Indignation: Elvis, How Could You!

Bob Dylan's Two Propositions

The Beach Boys and the Boomers' Music-Cued Nostalgia

Downton Abbey and Nostalgia Gluttony

Truth Decay and Healthy Distrust

In Praise of Binge Reading

Are You Ready for Some Autopsies?

The Morality of Enjoying Football

Super Bowl Sunday: A Roman Holiday

Rally 'Round the Math Class!

College Football and the Question of Cookie Corruption

The Wages of Amateurism

March Madness After All

Cooperstown: Museum or Shrine?

Baseball's Common Law

Autumn for Some Boys of Long Ago Summers

Vin Scully, Craftsman

"The Smartest Man in the United States"

The Roman Candle Jurist

William F. Buckley's High-Spirited Romp

The Twentieth Century's Most Consequential Journalist

Charles Krauthammer: "First, You Go to Medical School"

The Catcher at Dago Hill

Fidel Castro and Utopianism, Both Dead

Billy Graham: Neither Prophet nor Theologian

George McGovern: He Came by the Horror of War Honorably

Gerald Ford: The Benevolent Accident

George H. W. Bush: "I Am Not a Mystic"

"Then Along Came Nancy"

"The Eyes of Caligula and the Lips of Marilyn Monroe"

The Last Doughboy

Lieutenant Colonel Jim Walton.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

9780306924415

0306924412

OCLC:

1238088965